Florence Nightingale and the Crimean War

Introduction

Florence Nightingale is organized chronologically around the subject's life. It lacks a table of contents and an index, and although broken into numbered chapters, it is really an almost seamless essay. This format does not, however, cause any problem with organization. Woodham-Smith has done a very effective job of integrating the events of Nightingale's life with the history of the nineteenth century. The reader learns about this historical context almost as Nightingale found out about the world in which she lived; it is a particularly effective way for younger students to learn about a period.

Woodham-Smith not only tells the life story of one of the great heroines of the nineteenth century but also effectively sets that story into the history of the period. The book follows Nightingale's career from her struggles to become a nurse, to her enormous success in improving the care of casualties in the Crimean War, to Nightingale's use of her hero's status to orchestrate a campaign of sanitation and hospital reform for the entire British Empire (Weiner, pp. 274).

Nightingale's life breaks rather naturally into three segments. First, as a young woman, she became obsessed with the idea that she claimed to hear voices urging her on of becoming a nurse. Young women of her class were expected to find satisfaction in matrimony and motherhood, and any gainful employment was considered beneath them. Worse, nursing was a particularly disreputable activity, often practiced by prostitutes who were too drunk or elderly to achieve continued success in their creative endeavors. It was quite an achievement to persuade her horrified parents to agree to a period of training with a Protestant female religious order in Germany.

Nightingale's work focused first on military hospitals, but she soon broadened her view to include civilian establishments, as well. In 1860, she opened the Nightingale nurses training program at St. Thomas's hospital. Often an adviser to the government concerning medical and sanitation questions, she even became an expert on conditions in India. Much of modern nursing and many improvements in hospital care and sanitation grew from her assiduous efforts. After about 1872, however, she began to reduce her work load and devoted much time to a growing interest in mysticism. Nightingale also began to lose her eyesight in her later years, and she died in August, 1910.

The second segment of Nightingale's life began when she returned from her training and began to organize a group of nurses. Then, thanks to the support of Sidney Herbert, the secretary of state for war, she was granted the opportunity of taking her nurses to the Black Sea. Great Britain and France had chosen to defend the Ottoman Empire (Turkey) against Russia and had launched an invasion of the Crimean Peninsula. She found unspeakable conditions: Military hospitals were filthy, and nurses and orderlies stole the food that was intended for the wounded and failed to change the bloodied bed-linen between patients. By dint of her indomitable will the all-male Royal Army Medical Corps resented and ...